The Spirituality of Initiation

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Section 1: The Spirituality of Separation

Chapter 2: Strange Goddesses

"I am the Lord Thy God. Thou shalt not have strange gods before me."

Most men have a much harder time with strange goddess than strange gods. These goddesses are strange because they pop up in a man's life as a live woman. They rise up when a man falls, falls in love. "Love" turns an ordinary woman into a goddess whether she wants that transformation or not.

But there is a problem here. The problem is the first commandment of the Abrahamic tradition. When a man makes a woman a goddess, he places her above all else of human value. He gives her a spiritual and emotional power that far supersedes his own. He starts to live by her commandments. He sacrifices to her happiness. He makes her a strange god.

After a while he may resent the power he has given her, seeing it instead as power she has taken, power she has created. He may eventually blaspheme, swearing she has no power, while being terrified the goddess will desert him to his own hell. He starts resenting instead of repenting, not realizing he created the goddess in the first place.

Spirituality is primarily about love. Love that is found on the initiatory journey is a sign that the most important part of the journey has been achieved. However, what goes for love in our culture mirrors the wandering in the desert and the building of the golden, craven image. Love is seen as a shortcut to spirituality, more self comforting that coming to a true self. The false goddess is a temptation, often unknowingly, to detour around the path of initiation.

The Dance

The whole psychospiritual journey of a man calls him to dance with the feminine in her many guises, be it mother, lover, his own soul, the feminine face of God. To a man, the feminine is the life force. He is brought life by his mother who nurtures and protects him when he is most vulnerable to forces that can take that life. He dances with his mother from toddler to teenager, unless she is taken from him too soon.

Mother seems the first goddess because she is the life force he came from and the life force that nurtures and protects his own life. She gives life to a child, and if the child is chronically neglected or inadvertently abandoned, the child instinctively knows she has the power to take that life away. She is the creator. She is the higher power.

Mother energy, represents the grace of the life force, freely given without asking. She can be a reflection of the nurturing, protective face of God. Mother energy flowing through a woman carries an unimaginable strength of character, willing to give until her own life force is totally depleted even to death, for the sake of her children. There is no expectation of payback here. In many ways a man's mother can be the embodiment of the feminine face of God, the face of God that exudes unconditional love and nurturing.

From the womb forward a boy learns that the attitudes and behavior of his mother affect him deeply. Even in the womb a mother's feelings, translated into hormones and neurotransmitters, cross the placental barrier and become part of his own physiology. A mother's anxiety in the form of adrenaline and cortisol becomes a child's anxiety. A mother's depression, in the dearth of serotonin and other neurotransmitters, becomes a child's depression. And a mother's peace in the form of serotonin and certain endorphins becomes a child's peace.

In the womb the life force, in its physical and emotional forms, is literally transmitted from mother to child. As a very young boy grows he still is dependent on mother for his survival and comfort. Her attitude is part of the air he breathes. He sees the world through her eyes. He is awash in her life force. "If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy" is more true than not. His physiology is no longer totally dependent on her, yet his body still resonates to her moods from the residue of hormonal habit that is still a part of his own physiology. He learns that he is happier when she seems happy. He also learns that when she is unhappy she is able to give less comfort, while his body also feels agitated. Sometimes, due to illness, she is physically absent. In either case he has few ways to find his own comfort.

Some boys, at a mother's involuntary unhappiness, fall passive into a depression. Other boys anxiously try to make mother happy, a prodigious and largely futile undertaking. Either way, at a primitive level, the boy is terrified that his life force will be taken from him permanently by a woman who has lost her life force. Much anxiety and depression in men can be traced to this terror.

If a mother is able to comfort most of the time, the inevitable breaks of her withdrawal at times will ultimately strengthen him. Fathers and elders will build on these initiatory breaks by leading a boy toward initiation and the direct mystical experience of the Source of life. Through the process of initiation he will learn that the life force comes from a place as much inside himself as from his mother. He will learn that his mother has first introduced him to the Goddess in her own flesh. And by meeting the Goddess, the feminine face of God, in initiation he has found the true source of his life force.

The Goddess Lover

As a boy grows older, his life story still is overwhelmingly affected by his experience with the feminine in the guise of his mother. If there are not significant intervening variables of father and elder energy, a boy will become a man who turns women into false goddesses. He will seek a woman who represents the comforting life force that he experienced as a child. Her happiness will then become his first commandment. Doing whatever it takes to keep her presence becomes his second commandment.

This is when mother turns into lover, when the life force becomes sexualized, when sex becomes like a sacrament. Most men cannot make the connection between mother and lover. They feel they have left mother when they have left their mother's home. In fact they have left the guise of the mother. Yet they have not left the feminine as mother. Most men turn mother into lover and lover into mother. This kind of lover is not the healthy feminine, nor the way to the life force. This mother is not the incarnation of the Goddess, but an idol produced by a desperate man.

A man turns mother into lover by transferring his dreams of happiness, of everlasting comfort, to another woman. The new body then holds the secret to feeling alive. In this case newfound sexual excitement mimics the feeling of aliveness that can be given through contact with the life force. This feeling of aliveness becomes an experience of artificial grace.

This feeling of aliveness is really another form of addiction. This romantic high seems to have more to do with hormones, such as the 'love cocktail' of testosterone, phenylethylamine (PEA), and dopamine, than with love or grace. This hormonal high mirrors the high the mother was able to give when she comforted in the womb and after. A man's lover then becomes an impersonal conduit rather than a flesh and blood woman.

This hormonal high usually leaves after 6 to 24 months, sometimes longer. The exit of the romantic and sexual high often triggers the same feelings of agitation and terror as the withdrawal of mother. In this regressed state the man's resentment rises. The dream turns into a nightmare. The goddess turns into a demon. The search is on for another goddess.

The man who is unaware, who looks without instead of within, is hooked on this false spiritual high, this infatuation disguised as grace. He cannot distinguish being in love from love itself. Being in love means being caught up in the fantasy that a flesh and blood woman is a goddess. Being in love means that a man will look to a woman to give him the life force, often in the form of the false passion of sexual excitement. Being in love means that a man believes that a woman has the power to grace him with happiness. Being chronically in love means that a man will spend his life looking for Goddess in all the wrong places.

Love means connecting to a flesh and blood woman. As Fr. Anthony DeMello points out love "means to see a person, a situation, a thing as it really is, not as you imagine it to be." A man needs to treat a woman with the respect of a Goddess knowing she is not his goddess. He must realize that he must find the source of the life force alone, not through a woman. When she stops being a strange goddess she stops being a stranger. Love will then grow within this true reality. She will start to feel understood and he will understand. There will be no room for resentment. As an AA saying goes, "Expectations are premeditated resentments." False goddesses are carved out of false expectations.

Passion

The word passion means both excitement and suffering. We are all looking for the excitement of feeling fully alive. To be fully alive is another way of describing the spiritual attainment sometimes described as enlightenment, or holiness, or nirvana. To live passionately can mean to strive to be fully alive. Life itself becomes the means and the end. The sign of life passion is inner peace and joy.

Men are taught to settle for sexual passion or romantic passion instead of life passion, to settle for momentary euphoria instead of a lasting peace. We are taught that we can get passion without passion, euphoria while sidestepping initiatory pain. We are taught that true happiness is pain free, instead of learning that the peace that passes understanding is misunderstood because it includes pain. A crucial part of Jesus' message is that his passion for life included his passion on the cross.

Initiation involves both kinds of passion, excitement and suffering. Unfortunately, the suffering comes first, because much loss comes first. Fr. DeMello mentions that the start of the spiritual life is unlearning. Unlearning always involves painful disillusionment and loss. The start of the initiatory process is learning to absorb the loss of boyhood fantasies, one very painful loss for most men being the loss of adolescent ideas of romantic love. The start of the initiatory process is learning to integrate the passion of separation.

The experience of sexual passion in the context of romantic love is an overwhelming experience of life. In the midst of this passion a man feels fully alive. He is entirely in the present. He feels a life force pulsing through his body. All pain and anxiety seem to evaporate. He feels wonderfully light, even enlightened. He feels in the arms of a goddess. She is mother, lover, redeemer. With no elder to explain his feelings, he is ripe for conversion to a goddess cult.

A man who is caught within this cult will often experience depression soon after sexual passion ceases. He will also feel depressed when the beloved leaves, even briefly. This kind of depression is a sign that a man has not experienced the life force directly, but has lived off the life force of another. This kind of depression is a sign that a man still uses an emotional umbilicus that is attached to the psyche of another. This depression is more a sign of addiction, which is always a rejection of initiatory pain. Depression is instant withdrawal. Emptiness is the real feeling that signals separation.

When a man feels this depression he comes to a crossroads and an initiatory moment. He is in the midst of separation and loss. He is thrown into the gateway of initiation. He can either accept the passion of this suffering as an opportunity to find the life force himself, or he can continue to look for artificial passions, borrowed from another.

The greatest initiatory pain for a man is to give up the passion as the world portrays it. Men are deluged with sexual images devoid of any hint of woman as person, but alive with the sexual excitement of the hormonal variety. Sex devoid of friendship is always the sign of the false goddess. This is where giving up the goddess is so painful. Making a woman a false goddess always makes it feel so right, so morally right, so cosmically right. Like all goddesses of the lesser variety, a man becomes enchanted with natural spells, not supernatural energy. Like authentic spiritual experiences one is transported, residing in an altered state. So what if it is fleeting and artificial. It feels good and another opportunity is always being offered. As George Fuerstein says, "Orgasm is the greatest momentary thrill of which human beings are capable outside spiritual practice." And it relieves the pain, for now.

Instead of acting out this drama of false passion in an affair or promiscuity, many men keep their goddess within their fantasy. She will have many faces, sometimes just one. A man will keep her hidden deep within his own psyche, both exhilarated by her while ashamed of the secret. He will not share her with anyone, even closest friends. He will dwell on her memory or wait anxiously for her presence. She may have been an earthly woman he knew or she may be a composite of women composed of media images and fleeting experiences.

Many men worship her on the altar of pornography. The computer becomes a sacramental instrument. The ritual happens regularly when a man feels stressed and isolated. This ritual happens at a time of loss, most often experienced as emptiness or boredom. The loss is comforted, really anaesthetized, in the fantastic arms of a false goddess.

Most men are stunned at reaction of a wife or lover when she finds he has been using pornography. She feels absolutely bereft and rejected, angry and hurt. He sees no connection between his "private" activity and his relationship. She acts like he has had an affair, though she may not name that feeling. And her intuition would be right. He is having an affair with someone she can't compete with, a goddess.

If men don't deal with their fantasies, their secret religion, they will compulsively act a secret sexual ritual that they will be ashamed of sharing. They will love an earthly woman, but she will never be close to being a goddess. Compared to the goddess she will always be a disappointment. A man is then stuck between shame and disappointment in his search to be fully alive.

Sex is good and holy in itself when seen as an energy that is part of the life force. Sexual intimacy as part of the intimacy of a shared life journey lifts a man and a woman's love to a sacrament. Sex is meant to be part of the passion of life. It is the first taste of adult aliveness that all people feel. If taken as a preview of coming attractions it can be tremendously motivating. Then it can be an epiphany that we spend our lives trying to understand and embrace.

Epiphany

I most often see men who have gone through this cycle over and over, brought to the initiatory moment, not having the guidance or wisdom to accept the pain, knowing that they will inevitably return to their former pain, their former life, after the enchantment.

Then there are other men who have experienced a taste of healthy Goddess energy for the first time. They are blown away, torn open, totally entranced. They didn't know life could be like this. They do feel alive like never before. They will do anything, including trashing their former moral code, to keep the feeling.

They have never been in love like this before. They have experienced being fully alive. They have had an epiphany, a glimpse of the sacred. They have had a fleeting enlightenment. They have glimpsed the burning bush. As the Sufi realize, they have touched the Beloved. They have had a mystical experience. They are on the brink of an initiation.

Most men I know have experienced the goddess through a "special" woman before they are ready to experience the power of the spirit. To be sure there is the hormonal high and the dramatic sexual excitement. But there is more. Here there is true reverence and altruistic fervor. A man is torn open to realize that there is the other. A felt connection forms that carries a man beyond himself while opening his soul to a life he didn't know existed. Connection banishes isolation. There is a feeling of oneness beyond the ego.

To be sure some of the connection is the result of other hormonal releases in a man, the "feminine" hormones of connection and nurturing such as oxytocin and vasopressin. These chemicals can override an adolescent ego awash in testosterone.

But there seems to be much more happening. A man experiences Spirit and the vastness of his own soul. Psychologically he experiences parts of his personality he never knew existed, parts that dwelled in his unconscious rarely felt. Spiritually he has connected with a power beyond his psyche that resonates with his psyche. There is connection because they are on the same wave length. In both cases he comes in contact with his true self, his deeper self beyond his social self, that always feels sacred. He has connected directly with the life force, grace, chi, prana.

Initiation will always bring a man to the point of experiencing the sacred, to a mystical moment. Yet here is the challenge that comprises the initiatory moment. Here is the initiatory paradox. If a man does not have elders to explain parts of his initiation, he will invariably mistake the beloved for the Goddess. He will project his soul onto the special woman, believing her to be the source of his aliveness.

There is a Zen story about a master pointing to the moon and the unenlightened staring at the finger, thinking they understand. It is the same with this situation. A man will mistake his feelings for a woman for his spiritual life. A woman often doesn't realize this is happening. She is most often not far enough on her spiritual path to understand. For mysterious reasons she is used by the Goddess for a lesson. If she is a spiritual woman she will not take the man's attention seriously in terms of relationship, but she will reverence his feelings.

Most often the woman who catalyzes this spirituality does not understand her role in this drama. Neither does the man. The initiatory moment passes. The relationship, devoid of a spiritual component or emotional awareness, becomes lifeless. The man escapes back to fantasy, fueled by a preview he misunderstands. If the woman has not experienced her own initiation, she will be dumbfounded by the man's ultimate disenchantment, feeling hurt and betrayed.

I see most men in counseling in the midst of the spiritual drama of separation when a man has lost the goddess. These men are at risk for regressing to addictive fantasy because of the the passion and the pain. They are in the middle of initiatory loss.

Loss triggers the need for answers. Loss triggers the opening. In this case I see my role as eldering a man through this experience. I explain what I see as his initiatory opportunity, explaining his epiphany. I talk to the man about what I see as a true psychospiritual path. I talk of initiation. I talk of not worshiping strange goddesses. I talk of not mistaking the pointed finger for the moon.

Previous chapters of Spirituality Of Initiation are archived here.

My previous book, Toward Manhood, is archived here.